Crashes usually hardware or FSX?

[Anthony Salvino 10]

Hi, I have a fairly decent 2 yr old Alienware Aurora, 1080Ti, whole system set up for flight sim only, "FSX-SE". I recently had system freeze doing a default FSX-SE mission, Catalina Resort. I also notice sometimes white screen flashing when toggling from VC to spot view. Although I specked out the computer with a Dell rep & they said it was more than capable to handle FSX, I now have Orbx. I don't know, I'm starting to wonder if its the processor speed, its only 3.4 GZ, I'm thinking of selling computer & getting stronger one. 

Just curious, what is the average speed others use on here? Thanks.

[FreeBird(Josh) 314]

Dont let any sales man tell you you can run FSX they don't know. You need to get to 4.6 or higher to really make things shine.

[Jude Bradley 659]

That depends totally on the crash.

Did you check the event log (event viewer) to see what caused the crash? 
A simple text file can crash FSX.

The event viewer can usually tell if you have a hardware or software error  such as a visual studio runtime dependency error. 

Check out the CDT forum for guidance. 

 

[ckyliu 1,749]

I ran FSX fine on 3.3 GHz, generally if the system was underpowered you would see lower framerates rather than full-on hangs/freezes. High clock speeds are still better obviously.

When I had white flickering it was caused by incompatible shader mods, specifically enbserie not liking my ATI card.

You say you have "ORBX" but don't specify which products, their regions are very heavy so it's quite possibly you are OOMing (Out of Memory Error) which is a result of FSX being a 32 bit programme only able to address 4 GB of virtual address space (aka graphics and RAM). The cure for that would be to go to a 64 bit platform such as P3Dv4 or Xplane 11. Less drastic preventative measures you can take include disabling airport scenery on your route that you don't require (because FSX cannot really unload stuff its placed in to memory, so if you fly over an addon airport at 30,000 ft that will clog your memory/VAS up) which there are freeware tools for to ease this process.

Edited July 16, 2018 by ckyliu

[Anthony Salvino 10]

much thanks to both you for the advice, I will look into what you both mentioned. I appreciate it alot.

[Anthony Salvino 10]

2 hours ago, FreeBird(Josh) said:

Dont let any sales man tell you you can run FSX they don't know. You need to get to 4.6 or higher to really make things shine.

hmmm, Josh, I was thinking that, and I'm almost looking for a reason to buy a new computer, I'm going to make sure I cant fix things, if not, I may have to get that toys r us feeling again & go shopping.

[ckyliu 1,749]

Also do you have highmemfix in your fsx.cfg?

[Jim Young 2,356]

5 hours ago, ckyliu said:

Also do you have highmemfix in your fsx.cfg?

Not required with FSX-SE as Dovetail modified the config. 

10 hours ago, Anthony Biaggio said:

I recently had system freeze doing a default FSX-SE mission, Catalina Resort. I also notice sometimes white screen flashing when toggling from VC to spot view.

The AVSIM FSX Configuration Guide provides some valuable info too.  One has to understand FSX/FSX-SE will run at over 200 fps w/o any addons.  With my i7 2600K I was able to get over 300 fps... in default configurations.  Then I started adding add-ons, the eye-candy to make my immersion into flight simulation perfecto!  But the more eye-candy I installed, the slower the system would run and I would also see those dreaded OOM's (out of memory) crashes where you didn't run out of RAM type memory but virtual address space (VAS).  Microsoft Windows only gives you 4 GB's and when you are running a sim with a lot of nice scenery and aircraft, you are going to run out of space pretty fast.  And, when you do, the sim will crash.  There is nothing to prevent this except to lower settings (ugh!) and disable/reduce some eye-candy (double ugh!).  No tweaks or even the most powerful computer system in the world can stop you from running out of VAS.  See page 22, AVSIM FSX Configuration Guide for more information and a method to use to monitor VAS during a flight.  If you see you are running low on VAS, you might be able to take some action (like reduce more eye-candy, lower settings) to finish your flight session.  The critical part is during the descent and especially on the final.  VAS goes down fast then.

So, a faster computer for FSX-SE?  I would not spend the money.  It will not help with 32-bit applications.   For 64-bit applications like P3D and X-Plane, I would recommend it as it is virtually impossible to run out of VAS.  I think the limit is around 7TB's and that space is larger than most HDD's/SSD's on anyone's computer system.